Today the OpenFabrics Alliance (OFA) unveiled an expanded mission to accelerate the development and adoption of advanced fabric technologies. This is a significant expansion of its original mission from 2004, which was to facilitate the rapid adoption of an emerging network technology, known as the InfiniBand Architecture. The new mission expands its scope to include software for the entirety of the advanced networks landscape, including the InfiniBand Architecture. ”
The 15th Annual OFA Workshop, is returning to Austin, Texas – March 19-21, 2019 at the University of Texas at Austin.”

Xiaoyi Lu from OSU gave this talk at the 2018 OpenFabrics Workshop. “The convergence of Big Data and HPC has been pushing the innovation of accelerating Big Data analytics and management on modern HPC clusters. Recent studies have shown that the performance of Apache Hadoop, Spark, and Memcached can be significantly improved by leveraging the high-performance networking technologies, such as Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA). In this talk, we propose new communication and I/O schemes for these data analytics stacks, which are designed with RDMA over NVM and NVMe-SSD.”

“The 14th Annual OpenFabrics Alliance (OFA) Workshop, held in scenic Boulder, Colorado, recently concluded its week-long, community-wide collaboration and dialogue on OpenFabrics. As the premier means of fostering lively discussions among those who develop fabrics, deploy fabrics, and create applications that rely on fabrics, the Workshop is the ideal venue for the OpenFabrics community and networking industry at large to identify and address the wide variety of emerging industry requirements and challenges that remain.”

Haodong Tang from Intel gave this talk at the 2018 Open Fabrics Workshop. “Efficient network messenger is critical for today’s scale-out storage systems. Ceph is one of the most popular distributed storage system providing a scalable and reliable object, block and file storage services. As the explosive growth of Big Data continues, there’re strong demands leveraging Ceph build high performance & ultra-low latency storage solution in the cloud and bigdata environment. The traditional TCP/IP cannot satisfy this requirement, but Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) can.”

Brian Barrett from Amazon gave this talk at the 2018 OpenFabrics Workshop. “As network performance becomes a larger bottleneck in application performance, AWS is investing in improving HPC network performance. Our initial investment focused on improving performance in open source MPI implementations, with positive results. Recently, however, we have pivoted to focusing on using libfabric to improve point to point performance.”

Christoph Lameter from Jump Trading LLC gave this talk at the OpenFabrics Workshop. “Recently new types of memory have shown up like HBM (High Bandwidth Memory), Optane, 3DXpoint, NVDIMM, NVME and various “nonvolatile” types memory. This talk gives a brief rundown on what is available and gives some example on how the vendors enable the actual use of this memory in the operating system (f.e. DAX and filesystems) and then show how an application would make use of this memory. In particular then we will be looking at what considerations are important for the use of RDMA to those memory devices.”

Bill Magro from Intel gave this talk at the 2018 OpenFabrics Workshop. “Artificial Intelligence and High Performance Data Analytics workloads in the cloud are being fed by a deluge of data emanating from the Internet-connected population or people and things. This talk highlights the broadening role of OpenFabrics, in general, and the Open Fabrics Interface, in particular, to rise to the challenge of meeting the emerging requirements and become the software foundation for high-performance cloud fabrics.”

Bill Magro of Intel Corporation will kick off the OpenFabrics Workshop with a keynote speech, “Software Foundation for High-Performance Fabrics in the Cloud.” The event takes place April 9-13 in Boulder, Colorado. “This talk will highlight the broadening role of OpenFabrics, in general, and the Open Fabrics Interface, in particular, to rise to the challenge of meeting the emerging requirements and become the software foundation for high-performance cloud fabrics.”

In this special guest feature, Parks Fields and Paul Grun from the OpenFabrics Alliance write that the upcoming OFA Workshop in Boulder is an excellent opportunity to collaborate on the next generation of network fabrics. “Come join the community in Boulder this year to lend your voice to shaping the direction of fabric technology in big ways or small, or perhaps just to listen and learn about the latest trends coming down the pike, or to pick up tips and tricks to make you more effective in your daily job.”

The 13th Annual OpenFabrics Alliance (OFA) Workshop wrapped at the end of March with a look toward the future. The annual gathering, held this year in Austin, Texas, was devoted to advancing cutting edge networking technology through the ongoing collaborative efforts of OpenFabrics Software (OFS) producers and users. With a record 130+ attendees, the 2017 Workshop expanded on the OFA’s commitment to being an open organization by hosting an engaging Town Hall discussion and an At Large Board election, filling two newly added director seats for current members.

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